17 Magic Cloaks
Review by C. Demetrius Morgan
This review is of the PDF supplement product, 17 Magic Cloaks, from The Le Games and is currently available for sale from RPGnow for $2.00.
Target Audience: Game Masters running the D&D/D20 family of role-playing games.
Usefulness: Average. The usefulness of such products largely depends on the sort of campaign you are running and how much work you are willing to put into working with the material. If you are a GM that does not like to do a lot of work then this material will be of great utility to you. However, if you're the sort of GM who like to scribble down notes for magic items and what not then this product line will not be very useful.
Initial Impressions: It's a list of 17 magic items, more specifically cloaks, which hardly seems like much to get excited about.
Summary
What you get for your money is a roughly 4 MB ZIP file containing two PDFs of the items, one formatted for screen reading the other for printing, a RTF suitable for copy and pasting into your own work or editing the items to suit your needs, and the product cover art in JPG format. Additionally there's an JPG of an upcoming product, a PDF advert, and, of course, a read me file of the contents of the ZIP.
Designed for Use With: D20. Best fits with D&D and OGL fantasy games.
System Mechanics: None. These PDFs are little more than treasure lists.
Characters: None.
PDF Issues: None I noticed.
Negatives: The usefulness of these items is subjective. For my money I would rather see The Le bundle all their magic item supplements together into one massive tome.
Positives: The Le offers a assortment of smaller PDFs, each offering niche items, which means the budget minded GM can use their money to buy exactly what they want rather than being saddled with a massive tome that they may never use more than half of.
Appraisal
There's only one way to really appraise the product, and that’s the look at the magic items themselves. Here's what two dollars buys you:
Cloak of Aqua Men: Silly name but not so silly magic item. Allows wearing to breath underwater and communicate with marine life.
Cloak of Casting: Designed solely to give spell casters loopholes out of their penalties, this would never make it into my campaign.
Cloak of Colors: No, not Joseph's coat of many colors, but close! The cloak's powers are based on it's color, which changes at midnight. Not a bad idea but there's only three colors and three powers provided; a great idea but poorly implemented.
Cloak of Deflection: Worst cosmic disconnect between description and "power" I've ever seen. The cloak is described as shimmering in sunlight, "constantly shifting .. as if alive" yet instead of giving a to hit penalty against attackers (you do have to SEE your target) it merely deflects the weapons? Monty Haul would be proud.
Cloak of Dragon Strike: Read this, "This cloak is always scaly in nature .. The cloak itself is always cool to the touch". How about this: "Cool to the touch, this cloak is rough like dragon scales ..". It gets worse. This cloak "every 5 days" can be transformed into a Dragon to fight by the wearers side. Uhm, hello, if the cloak is meant to be using morphing magic wouldn't it be more logical to have the WEARER turned into a dragon? (Not to mention more fun to role-play.) Otherwise this is just an +1 cloak! If a player handed me this item on a sheet I'd put it in my paper shredder.
Cloak of Goo: And here is where I stopped reading. Hoo-hum. The cloak feels sticky to the touch, says the entry, the wearer can make it turn into goo that falls to the ground and can then be shaped into walls or. . . STOP! Just, just STOP!
Here're the rest of the cloaks: Cloak of Healing, Cloak of Feasting, Cloak of Flames, Cloak of Force, Cloak of Phasing, Cloak of Precognition, Cloak of Razor Flight, Cloak of Souls, Cloak of Spikes, Cloak of Ugliness, Cloak of Vampirism.
Some of those cloaks are not bad but, from where I'm sitting, some of the items are so poorly conceived that it boggles the mind. To be perfectly honest there were moments I felt like I was reading the product of a ten year old's fruitful imagination. As a former DM I can tell you, with all honesty, that magic item creation is more of an art than a skill. Some people can create a well balanced magic item while others, well meaning as they may be, just can't. Yes, I created some craptacular magic items as a newbie DM, so I know of what I speak. (Some of these items have that same first time DM feel to them.) Of course D&D has come a long way, but unless balance and logic are no longer required. . .
On the other hand, with a few modifications, the Cloak of Goo would make a great cursed item. In fact there's quite a few items that, if I was the sort of GM who got angry at his players, which of course we GM's never allow to happen, I'd toss their way to teach them a lesson. It's all a matter of perspective. Good and bad is in the eye of the beholder.
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Copyright © C. Demetrius Morgan
Review Summary